Thursday, March 8, 2018

Playing the blame game over "Polish" death camps

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, March 7.)

Truth can be
elusive. Consider the recent furore over the Polish government’s introduction
of a law that, according to some critics, will greatly restrict public
discussion of Poland’s involvement in the Holocaust during World War Two.

The new law
prohibits mention of “Polish death camps” – on the face of it, an interference
in the right of free speech. Yet it’s hard not to feel sympathy for Poland’s
lawmakers.

Auschwitz
(or Oswiecim, as it’s properly known in Polish) and other notorious
extermination camps – Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek – may have been sited on
Polish soil, but they were not put there by Poles.

They were
built and administered by Nazi Germany, which preferred to conduct its
programme of genocide outside its own borders. Perhaps that was the Nazis’ way
of pretending their hands were clean.

I have been
to Auschwitz, but even standing on the site of the gas chambers, it’s
impossible to grasp the enormity of what happened there.

The Germans
alone were culpable, but the commonly used phrase “Polish death camps” carried
the implication that Poland was somehow responsible for these abominations. And
as the generations who remember World War Two gradually die out, there was a
risk that people who don’t know any better might be misled into thinking that
Poland as a nation was complicit in the Holocaust.

Seen in this
context, who could object if the Polish government wanted to prohibit usage of
the term? Yet Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu strenuously denounced
the law change and even implied that Poland was guilty of Holocaust denial.

Really?
Weren’t the Poles entitled to protect their national reputation?

My
95-year-old Polish mother-in-law, who remembers the war only too well, was
seriously indignant at Netanyahu’s objections, as I imagine most New Zealand
Poles would have been. She interpreted his statements as suggesting that the
Poles collectively bore some responsibility for the Nazi death camps, which
would have been a grievous slur on Polish honour.

But this is
where it gets complicated. Some Israeli critics argue that the Polish law
change threatens to stifle debate about Poles who killed Jews during the war.

As is so
often the case, the truth lies somewhere between extremes. Polish people were
neither fully complicit in the Holocaust, nor wholly innocent.

There were
documented cases of Poles, police included, playing an active role. As in some
other eastern European countries, a degree of anti-Semitism was rooted in
Polish culture.

Against
that, as my mother-in-law would point out, there were many well-documented
cases of Poles risking their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. The Polish
nurse Irena Sendler was credited with smuggling 2500 Jewish children out of the
Warsaw Ghetto and thereby saving them from the gas chambers – a feat of
extraordinary courage for which she was honoured in 1965 by the state of
Israel.

The Polish
underground organisation Zegota, of which Sendler was a member, operated secret
cells that supplied aid to an estimated 50,000 Polish Jews in hiding.

These
examples run counter to the narrative, promoted by some Jewish critics of the
recent law change, that portrayed Poland as complicit in the Holocaust.

An article
by Alex Ryvchin, director of public affairs at the Australian Council of
Australian Jewry, made the scurrilous claim that “Poles were often only too
happy to see the demise of their Jewish neighbours”. There you have it – an
entire country casually libelled in a few words.

As a public
relations strategy, the tendency of some Jewish activists to stridently allege
anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial everywhere they look seems doomed to produce
diminishing returns. It has become a kneejerk reaction to allege anti-Semitic
motives even where none exist. A possible consequence of this tendency to play the blame game is that people will take the phone off the hook.

Like the
Polish politicians who worry that ignorant people might interpret the phrase
“Polish death camps” literally, Jewish activists are concerned that generations
will grow up knowing nothing of the atrocities committed against Jews during
the war.

But in their
eagerness to remind us of the terrible things that happened to Jewry, they run
the risk that they will be seen as promoting a perception that only Jews are
allowed to be seen as victims of Nazism. And in their determination to portray
themselves as being at war with an implacably hostile world, they risk
alienating people who might otherwise be their friends.

No one can
deny that Jews were uniquely targeted for extermination, but others suffered
terribly too.

Poles, like
Jews, were considered an inferior race by the Nazis. Nearly six million Poles
died under German occupation. Many of those who survived, my parents-in-law
among them, were forcibly displaced and put to work in slave labour camps.

The truth,
as I said at the start of this column, can be elusive. The Polish death camps
were Nazi creations – that’s one truth. Some Poles collaborated in the
persecution of Jews – that’s another truth. These truths can co-exist without
cancelling each other out.

The
ultimate, incontrovertible truth is that war is brutally dehumanising; terrible
things happen.

1 comment:

I do wonder at the motive behind this Polish government move, given the country's ongoing fall towards authoritarianism (along with Hungary's). While, yes, many ordinary Poles (and Hungarians) sheltered and helped their Jewish neighbours, many did not, and cheered them to the gas chambers.

However, as someone with a deep interest in that period of history, I do note that many people today appear not to realise that the death camps (ie those with the extermination facilities) were in Poland, not Germany; and that the camps in Germany, Austria and parts of Czechoslavkia (eg Theresienstadt) were "concentration camps" -- places of misery, enslavery and death, but not actually designed and operated as extermination facilities.

On a similar subject, one still hears from older generations of Germans that they had no idea what Hitler was doing to the Jews. This was conclusively proved false in a recent book, The German War by Nicholas Stargardt, an Oxford professor of history. His book is compiled from the diaries, letters and telegrams of "ordinary" Germans during the war. Their letters explicitly mention the fate of the Jews and German complicity in it.

For example, in letters written after Bomber Harris set Hamburg ablaze in 1943 (he actually called it Operation Gomorrah), various letters speak of the firestorm being God's revenge "for what we have done to the Jews." There are many similar letters and diary entries.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.